market folly

DoubleLine Capital's CEO Jeff Gundlach recently appeared on Bloomberg to talk about how to invest in this environment and claimed that "investors should be holding cash."  Below are some excerpts from his interview as well as the video.

He noted that risk assets have diminishing returns and that he didn't see much value in the US stock market and said to act cautiously in the US bond market.


On how to trade this environment:

"I think that investors should be looking for lower prices on most risk assets in these developed countries with the exception of Japan... investors should be looking for the potential inflationary consequences of all this money printing exercise and the place to look for that is Japan."


On whether investors should get more disciplined and look at fundamentals:

"The fundamentals are always important but it does get trumped by policy decisions when policy decisions are so radical as has been the case in recent years…There seems to be diminishing returns on the various rounds of quantitative easing. It's almost like a half-life of a radioactive particle. The first quantitative easing brought 50%, the second brought a little more than half of that, the third half again, the fourth less than half again. It just seems that the idea of a Pavlovian reaction when you see quantitative easing that you should go out and buy risk assets--it has worked four times, but it doesn't seem like you are getting much bang for your buck any more…I would point out that gold, for example, hasn't done much of anything in the last couple of rounds of quantitative easing. It seems that the fundamentals are starting to exert themselves more powerfully against the backdrop of endless quantitative easing, so it's possible that the market support is close to finding its limit. This is why I think that investors should be holding cash and buying risk assets at lower prices once the fundamentals assert themselves."


On where to put money now:

"You've got to survive with virtually no return if that's the way you look at things. I actually recommend that for many investors. I think the small amount of money that you might make by trying to push it here as we get closer and closer to the end game where this thing might tail out--the amount of money you might make will be dwarfed by the amount of money you might lose when things reprice lower. Put it another way, if you just stay in cash and earn a small return or stay in a low risk investment and earn a middling single digit return--the money you might be able to make as we move into late 2013 or early 2014 with repricing, the amount of money you might make if you are able to deploy the money at that point will make all the difference. People always want investments to go up like a line…That's just not reality. You make 80% of your money in 20% of the time in investing and you have to be patient…I see some values in some of these foreign markets. I don't see a lot of value in the U.S. stock market and I think you have to play it safe in the U.S. bond market with funds that are really dedicated to having low volatility." 


Embedded below is the video of Gundlach's interview with Bloomberg TV: